Quotemrlynn
I had a .mac email address. Then after Apple changed to the silly.me I tried to access it. Turned out they had given it to some other 'mrlynn' in England! Though I hadn't been using it, I was annoyed.

/Mr Lynn

The same thing happened to me too! And I bet it went to England also!

What was truly messed up was that supposedly I could still use my .mac e-mail for AIM, but I had lost it for e-mail since I wasn't paying for it during the time of the transition to .me.

Quotemrlynn
I had a .mac email address. Then after Apple changed to the silly.me I tried to access it. Turned out they had given it to some other 'mrlynn' in England! Though I hadn't been using it, I was annoyed.

/Mr Lynn

The same thing happened to me too! And I bet it went to England also!

What was truly messed up was that supposedly I could still use my .mac e-mail for AIM, but I had lost it for e-mail since I wasn't paying for it during the time of the transition to .me.

I’m annoyed for both of you!

Inside every old person is a young person saying "what happened?"

“Love is the motive, but justice is the instrument.” - Reinhold Niebuhr

“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” George Orwell

Quotemrlynn
I had a .mac email address. Then after Apple changed to the silly.me I tried to access it. Turned out they had given it to some other 'mrlynn' in England! Though I hadn't been using it, I was annoyed.

/Mr Lynn

The same thing happened to me too! And I bet it went to England also!

What was truly messed up was that supposedly I could still use my .mac e-mail for AIM, but I had lost it for e-mail since I wasn't paying for it during the time of the transition to .me.

I've had several family mac.com addresses that also inherited the me.com and icloud.com variants when they became available, but we just give out the mac.com form.

Lately I've been getting email being sent to the icloud.com variant of one of them for some guy in, you guessed it, England. He even setup an Amazon.co.uk account and gave them my email address and I got an order confirmation recently. I suspect that he really has a different iCloud account and is constantly misspelling it to get mine. His first and middle name concatenated forms my username.

I kept my .mac address and still use it all the time. You have to be grandfathered in, I think. But she can have an icloud address. As with mstudio above, I can now use .mac, .me, or .icloud. They seem to be some sort of aliases for the same account.

Quotewikipedia
An iCloud account includes an email account, much like MobileMe, .Mac, and iTools did previously. Unlike MobileMe and its previous iterations, an email address is an optional part of an iCloud account, in that the user can choose not to use it but can still use the email as their iCloud Apple ID. The email account can be accessed using any standard IMAP-compatible email client, as well as the online web app mail client at the iCloud.com. Additionally, on an iOS device, iCloud email is push-enabled.

Users converting existing MobileMe accounts to iCloud accounts kept their existing "@me.com" email addresses, and users whose accounts pre-dated MobileMe and had both me.com and mac.com email addresses kept both. As with the .Mac to MobileMe transition, existing users get to keep their old addresses and also get a matching new iCloud.com address, so messages sent to a valid account with multiple addresses all end up in the same inbox.

I still use my @mac.com address for everything, but emails sent to the same @me.com and @icloud.com all come to my @mac.com mailbox, FWIW.

My wife got one right near the end of the @mac.com era. By the time my kids were getting email addresses we were in the MobileMe era, so theirs is @me.com (and same for them with using the @icloud.com versions as well).

I had a.Mac address that matched my name, but let it go when Apple started charging. When I signed up for a .me address, Apple had given away my name, even though it had originally been attached to.Mac. I was frustrated but I couldn’t resurrect the old address, but that’s how it rolls I guess.

If you do have an older .mac email, is there a practical difference between .me, .mac. and .icloud? This trips me up sometimes with some services. I know I need the iCloud variant for general syncing, but I believe my family sharing setup uses the .mac variant. And while I only use the email address for certain things, I've mixed up some account registrations using a combination of all three.

I surrendered a couple of good mac.com email addresses because it didn't make sense to pay for them. I also remember reading an article by Andy Ihnatko lamenting his failure to get andyi@mac.com even thought he tried immediately and owned it on almost every other platform.